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Digital Promotions: Driving Sales And Brand Awareness Through Promotional Incentives

By Cyndi Walker

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 24Aug2009 Word count: 703 Viewed: 372 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Digital promotions continue to spur billions of dollars in annual sales for product suppliers. By offering promotional incentives, companies can tap into a vast pool of consumers that would otherwise be all but unreachable. Too often, companies pursue conventional advertising methods to penetrate new markets through the mass merchandisers. While the big-box chain stores represent a potent marketing force, product suppliers can break through far more easily by leveraging promotional incentives.

The promotional industry offers a host of powerful advantages to product suppliers. Below, we'll describe these advantages and explain how digital promotions can be used to tap into new, robust markets. We'll also describe how they can improve customer loyalty and support a subscription based revenue model.

Key Advantages Of Digital Promotions

The value of digital promotions is becoming more widely recognized, yet many companies still fail to fully appreciate their potential. For example, an incentive promotion can be used to educate a market about a new product. Whenever a product is developed, its success hinges upon the market's awareness. In order to penetrate a retail sector, the supplier must have a way to introduce the product and educate the market regarding its use and value. This education often forms the core of market acceptance and customer acquisition.

Digital promotions can also improve brand loyalty and increase the value of existing customer relationships. Once a product supplier has penetrated a new retail market, it is critical that they continue marketing to those customers. This can be accomplished by capturing customer data online and using it to launch an ongoing string of personalized digital promotions.

Customer acquisition is expensive, especially when pursued through traditional advertising channels. By perpetually marketing digital promotions to an existing base, product suppliers can increase the lifetime value of each customer.

Using Incentive Promotions To Tap Into New Markets

Tapping into new markets is dependent upon motivating consumers to use a product. If a market is uneducated regarding a given product, there is often substantial resistance to it. Indeed, there is no shortage of valuable products that have failed to gain market acceptance simply due to a lack of education or awareness.

Digital promotions offer product suppliers a potent vehicle with which to incentivize consumer adoption. By giving consumers an attractive incentive to sample an item (for example, free music downloads), a supplier can reach millions of new potential customers. Not only does this spur sales, but it sets the stage for developing profitable customer loyalty programs that leverage digital media.

Digital Promotions Support Customer Loyalty Programs

As noted, customer acquisition is costly. While digital promotions allow product suppliers to generate new customers for a substantially reduced cost, the price of acquisition cannot be dismissed. This highlights the need for improving customer loyalty, a task for which incentive promotions are uniquely qualified.

The initial offer of a digitally delivered incentive allows product suppliers to capture valuable information about new customers. That information can be used to launch a customer loyalty program that insulates a supplier from competitors while generating repeat sales. By offering ongoing incentives, product suppliers can turn customers into loyal fans.

Building A Subscription Model With Digital Promotions

Subscription and continuity programs are powerful revenue generators. ISPs, wireless providers, magazines, and cable television companies have built empires based upon this model. Digital promotions offer a cost-effective platform from which companies can penetrate new retail markets and acquire customers for a subscription based product. By offering free samples of digitally delivered content, suppliers can tap into an enormous consumer market. What's more, they can do so without absorbing the prohibitive cost of conventional marketing channels.

Digital Promotions Generate Both Instant And Ongoing Sales

Digital promotions offer companies an accelerated route through which to penetrate new retail markets. For many product suppliers, the objective is to increase market awareness of their brand and trigger an immediate wave of sales. For others, the goal is to capture shelf space across thousands of giant retailers, thereby reaching a massive pool of consumers. Still others seek to encourage repeat sales through improved customer loyalty. In each case, digital promotions can play a pivotal role. When harnessed properly, they can give product suppliers the edge they need to penetrate and dominate a market.

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